Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography by Joakim Garff

Author:Joakim Garff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-03-29T16:00:00+00:00

“This Sweat-Soaked, Stifling Cloak of Mush That Is the Body”

“Kierkegaard almost resembled a caricature,” wrote one of his contemporaries, the theologian Peter Christian Zahle, who went on to provide us with this concise portrait: “Under the low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat one saw the big head with the coarse, dark-brown hair; the blue, expressive eyes; the pale yellow color of his face and the sunken cheeks, with many deep wrinkles down the cheeks and around a mouth, which spoke even when it was silent. He frequently carried his head tilted a little to one side. His back was a bit curved. He had a cane or an umbrella under his arm. The brown coat was tight and snugly buttoned around the thin body. The weak legs seemed to bear their burden uncertainly, but for a long time they served to carry him from the study out into the open air, where he took his ‘people bath.’ ” Zahle gives us a picture of an aging Kierkegaard, but since he aged strikingly quickly, according to the testimony of many, it is not unreasonable to assign the portrait to the later 1840s, perhaps even earlier. Thus one day, when Hans Brøchner had touched on the relationship between existential intensity and biological age, he intimated to Kierkegaard that he was truly “the oldest man” he had ever known, Kierkegaard merely smiled, thereby apparently accepting Brøchner’s “mode of calculation.”

More than the angle from which a person viewed Kierkegaard, it was the eyes that did the viewing that determined whether one characterized him, as Zahle does here, as having a “back [that] was a bit curved” or as: “high-shouldered” (Regine) or with “his shoulders hunched forward a bit” (Goldschmidt) or “with a crookedness that seemed just on the verge of hunchback” (Sibbern) or “somewhat deformed or at any rate round-shouldered” (Hertz) or “round-shouldered” (Otto Zinck), or simply “hunchbacked” (Carl Brosbøll and Troels-Lund). In any case this back, subsequently so world-famous, was not straight, and its irregularities, according to Henriette Lund and others, were perhaps owing to a fall he had once taken from a tree in Buddinge Mark, a village a little north of Copenhagen. “The shape of his body was striking, not really ugly, certainly not repulsive, but with something disharmonious, rather slight, and yet also weighty,” wrote Goldschmidt, whose physiognomic portrait trails off into an impressionistic stroke of genius: “He went about like a thought that had got distracted at the very moment at which it was formed.” Touché.

Hertz also left some quite fine sketches for a portrait in one his notebooks from the late 1840s, when he had the idea of writing a play that would feature a certain Johannes Climacus, whose form, drawn “from nature,” was as follows: “of middle height, with broad shoulders and a rather rounded back, a thin lower body; a bit bent-over when he walks; thin, rather long hair; blue? eyes; the voice often breaking into a treble or a bit piping. Also quite easily provoked to laughter, but suddenly switching to seriousness.

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